Teaching to Transgress This page intentionally left blank Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom bell hooks Routledge New York London Published in 1994 by Published in Great Britain by Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square New York, NY 10017 Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN Copyright © 1994 Gloria Watkins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data hooks, bell. Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom / bell hooks p. cm. Includes index ISBN 0-415-90807-8 — ISBN 0-415-90808-6 (pbk.) 1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Critical thinking—Study and teaching. 3. Feminism and education. 4. Teaching. I. Title. LC196.H66 1994 370.11 '5—dc20 94-26248 CIP to all my students, especially to LaRon who dances with angels in gratitude for all the times we start over—begin again— renew our joy in learning. “. to begin always anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not spoil, to refuse to bureaucratize the mind, to understand and to live life as a process—live to become ...” —Paulo Freire This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction I Teaching to Transgress 1 Engaged Pedagogy 13 2 A Revolution of Values 23 The Promise of Multicultural Change 3 Embracing Change 35 Teaching in a Multicultural World 4 Paulo Freire 45 5 Theory as Liberatory Practice 59 6 Essentialism and Experience 77 7 Holding My Sister’s Hand 93 Feminist Solidarity 8 Feminist Thinking 111 In the Classroom Right Now 9 Feminist Scholarship 119 Black Scholars 10 Building a Teaching Community 129 A Dialogue 11 Language 167 Teaching New Worlds /N ew Words Confronting Class 12 in the Classroom 177 Eros, Eroticism, 13 and the Pedagogical Process 191 14 Ecstasy 201 Teaching and Learning Without Limits Index 209 Introduction Teaching to Transgress In the weeks before the English Department at Oberlin Col­ lege was about to decide whether or not I would be granted tenure, I was haunted by dreams of running away—of disap­ pearing—yes, even of dying. These dreams were not a response to fear that I would not be granted tenure. They were a response to the reality that I would be granted tenure. I was afraid that I would be trapped in the academy forever. Instead of feeling elated when I received tenure, I fell into a deep, life-threatening depression. Since everyone around me believed that I should be relieved, thrilled, proud, I felt “guilty” about my “real” feelings and could not share them with any­ one. The lecture circuit took me to sunny California and the New Age world of my sister’s house in Laguna Beach where I was able to chill out for a month. When I shared my feelings with my sister (she’s a therapist), she reassured me that they were entirely appropriate because, she said, “You never wanted 2 Teaching to Transgress to be a teacher. Since we were little, all you ever wanted to do was write.” She was right. It was always assumed by everyone else that I would become a teacher. In the apartheid South, black girls from working-class backgrounds had three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers. And since, according to the sexist thinking of the time, men did not really desire “smart” women, it was assumed that signs of intelligence sealed one’s fate. From grade school on, I was destined to become a teacher. But the dream of becoming a writer was always present with­ in me. From childhood, I believed that I would teach and write. Writing would be the serious work, teaching would be the not-so-serious-I-need-to-make-a-living ‘job.” Writing, I believed then, was all about private longing and personal glory, but teaching was about service, giving back to one’s community. For black folks teaching—educating—was fundamentally polit­ ical because it was rooted in antiracist struggle. Indeed, my all­ black grade schools became the location where I experienced learning as revolution. Almost all our teachers at Booker T. Washington were black women. They were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers—black folks who used our “minds.” We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundam ental way to resist every strategy of white racist coloni­ zation. Though they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial. Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intel­ lectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a mission. Introduction 3 To fulfill that mission, my teachers made sure they “knew” us. They knew our parents, our economic status, where we wor­ shipped, what our homes were like, and how we were treated in the family. I went to school at a historical m om ent where I was being taught by the same teachers who had taught my mother, her sisters, and brothers. My effort and ability to learn was always contextualized within the framework of generational family experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits of being were traced back. Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved being a stu­ dent. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy—plea­ sure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the dan­ ger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority. When we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment. Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom. Realizing this, I lost my love of school. 4 Teaching to Transgress The classroom was no longer a place of pleasure or ecstasy. School was still a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically infe­ rior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn. Yet, the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic. We were always and only responding and reacting to white folks. That shift from beloved, all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers, as not really belonging, taught me the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination. The rare white teacher who dared to resist, who would not allow racist biases to determine how we were taught, sustained the belief that learning at its most pow­ erful could indeed liberate. A few black teachers had joined us in the desegregation process. And, although it was more diffi­ cult, they continued to nurture black students even as their efforts were constrained by the suspicion they were favoring their own race. Despite intensely negative experiences, I graduated from school still believing that education was enabling, that it en­ hanced our capacity to be free. When I began undergraduate work at Stanford University, I was enthralled with the process of becoming an insurgent black intellectual. It surprised and shocked me to sit in classes where professors were not excited about teaching, where they did not seem to have a clue that education was about the practice of freedom. During college, the primary lesson was reinforced: we were to learn obedience to authority. In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility. I Introduction 5 wrote my first book during those undergraduate years, even though it was not published until years later. I was writing; but more importantly I was preparing to become a teacher. Accepting the teaching profession as my destiny, I was tor­ mented by the classroom reality I had known both as an under­ graduate and a graduate student. The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact ritu­ als of control that were about domination and the unjust exer­ cise of power.